A 57-year-old father of 11 reliant on social welfare has been jailed for three years for assisting a criminal organisation launder money after a Garda investigation established that he controlled a bank account in which €228,000 was deposited in various transactions over a four-year period.
Chilimbar Vasile of Eagle Valley, Sarsfield Road, Wilton, Cork, was caught by gardaí on January 25th, 2021, with an AIB bank card for an account in someone else’s name and upon examination of the account, gardaí established that €228,474 passed through the account between 2017 and 2021.
Last week, Vasile pleaded guilty to a money-laundering charge which stated that on September 24th, 2019, he transferred the proceeds of criminal conduct, namely money, to an AIB account in another name, knowing or being reckless as to whether it was the proceeds of crime.
Judge Colin Daly had remanded Vasile to appear at Cork Circuit Criminal Court on Wednesday for sentence and he recalled the evidence given by Det Garda David Kelleher that Vasile was in receipt of €455 per week in disability allowance and had received rent allowance of €164,000 over several years.
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Det Garda Kelleher said that gardaí had found the AIB bank card during a search of Vasile’s property on January 25th, 2021, as part of their investigation into money laundering and they also found cash lodgment slips for sums totalling €1,400 made that same day to the account.
Gardaí found live CCTV footage on Vasile’s phone showing a huge house in his native Romania where a large volume of notes and coins in multiple denominations was being counted on a kitchen table and inquires through Interpol confirmed Vasile owned the house but there was no mortgage on it.
Judge Daly said Vasile, who had no history of employment in Ireland and was in receipt of social welfare, admitted using the AIB bank account for several years but was unable to explain how €228,000 went through the account other than to say he got money from selling The Big Issue.
He said that Vasile’s conduct here “appeared to be assisting a criminal-based organisation – however, in this case, it appears to be a family-based enterprise” as he noted that Vasile was “the only person who operated and managed the account over this four-year-long period”.
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The court had previously heard that Vasile had five convictions for theft relating to stealing cash from church collection boxes in Carrigtwohill, Cloyne and Shanagarry in east Cork and Dungarvan in Co Waterford where he used a hook to fish money in envelopes from the boxes.
Judge Daly indicated a headline sentence of seven years, but said he would reduce it to 5½ years to take into account his guilty plea.
Judge Daly said that he was also obliged to take into account Vasile’s personal circumstances in his sentence, including the fact he was a father of 11 children, some of whom were dependent on him and that he had a number of medical conditions including diabetes and epilepsy.
He noted that although Vasile had been in Ireland for some 18 years, he had limited English. He also accepted that going to prison for the first time at the age of 57 would also be difficult so he reduced the sentence further to four years and suspended the final year of the sentence.
